•  3
    Challenges Facing the Appeal to Practical Wisdom in Medicine and Beyond
    -The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine. forthcoming.
    As work on practical wisdom and medicine accelerates, now is a good time to outline some important challenges that any approach to developing an account of this virtue faces. More specifically, I develop five challenges having to do with the existence and nature of practical wisdom, and whether it connects with objective and general normative truths. The main goal is to provide a guide to the challenges themselves and some of the options available for tackling them, rather than trying to resolve…Read more
  •  11
    Challenges Facing the Appeal to Practical Wisdom in Medicine and Beyond
    Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. forthcoming.
    As work on practical wisdom and medicine accelerates, now is a good time to outline some important challenges that any approach to developing an account of this virtue faces. More specifically, I develop five challenges having to do with the existence and nature of practical wisdom, and whether it connects with objective and general normative truths. The main goal is to provide a guide to the challenges themselves and some of the options available for tackling them, rather than trying to resolve…Read more
  •  22
    Patience: A New Account of a Neglected Virtue
    with R. Michael Furr
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1-21. forthcoming.
    The goal of this article is to outline a new account of the virtue of patience. To help build the account, we focus on five important issues pertaining to patience: (i) goals and time, (ii) emotion, (iii) continence versus virtue, (iv) motivation, and (v) good ends. The heart of the resulting account is that patience is a cross-situational and stable disposition to react, both internally and externally, to slower than desired progress toward goal achievement with a reasonable level of calmness. …Read more
  •  260
    Deepfakes and Dishonesty
    Philosophy and Technology 37 (120): 1-24. 2024.
    Deepfakes raise various concerns: risks of political destabilization, depictions of persons without consent and causing them harms, erosion of trust in video and audio as reliable sources of evidence, and more. These concerns have been the focus of recent work in the philosophical literature on deepfakes. However, there has been almost no sustained philosophical analysis of deepfakes from the perspective of concerns about honesty and dishonesty. That deepfakes are potentially deceptive is unsurp…Read more
  • Moral psychology (edited book)
    MIT Press. 2017.
  • Honesty
    In Walter Sinnott-Armstrong & Christian Miller (eds.), Moral psychology, Mit Press. 2017.
  • The problem of character
    In S. van Hooft, N. Athanassoulis, J. Kawall, J. Oakley & L. van Zyl (eds.), The handbook of virtue ethics, Acumen Publishing. 2014.
  • Divine Will Theory: Intentions or Desires?
    Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 2 (1). 2010.
  •  2
    The Bloomsbury Companion to Ethics (edited book)
    Bloomsbury Academic. 2014.
    The Bloomsbury Companion to Ethics offers the definitive guide to this key area of contemporary philosophy. Covering all the fundamental questions asked by meta-ethics and normative ethical theory, thirteen specially commissioned chapters from an international team of experts explore the central ideas, terms and case studies in the field, and new directions in ethics as a whole. Now available in paperback, the Companion to Ethics covers issues such as moral methodology, moral realism, ethical ex…Read more
  • The Bloomsbury Handbook of Ethics, 2nd Edition (edited book)
    Bloomsbury. 2023.
  •  28
    Moral Relativism and Moral Psychology
    In Steven D. Hales (ed.), A Companion to Relativism, Wiley-blackwell. 2010.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Abstract Introduction Psychological Studies of Folk Moral Judgments From Expressivism to Moral Relativism From Sentimental Rules to Moral Relativism From Constructive Sentimentalism to Moral Relativism References.
  •  23
    Generosity
    In Michel Croce & Maria Silvia Vaccarezza (eds.), Connecting Virtues: Advances in Ethics, Epistemology, and Political Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2018.
    There have only been three articles in mainstream philosophy journals going back at least to the 1970s on generosity. This paper hopes to draw attention to this neglected virtue. By building on what work has already been done, and trying to advance that discussion along several different dimensions, it hopes that others will take a closer look at this important and surprisingly complex virtue. More specifically, it formulates three important necessary conditions for what is involved in possessin…Read more
  •  19
    Naturalism and Moral Psychology
    In Kelly James Clark (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism, Wiley-blackwell. 2015.
    This chapter considers recent work in ethics that takes seriously empirical work in moral psychology, and from that starting point ends up drawing certain conclusions in metaethics that go against traditional moral realist positions. In particular, it considers the work of four leading naturalistic moral psychologists: Joshua Greene, Shaun Nichols, Jesse Prinz, and John Doris.
  •  16
    Defeaters and the Basicality of Theistic Belief
    In René Woudenberg, Sabine Roeser & Ron Rood (eds.), Basic Belief and Basic Knowledge: Papers in Epistemology, De Gruyter. pp. 147-176. 2005.
  •  46
    Rorty and Tolerance
    Theoria 50 (101): 94-108. 2003.
    While Richard Rorty's general views on truth, objectivity, and relativism continue to attract much attention from professional philosophers, some of his contributions to ethical theory have thus far been remarkably neglected. In other work, I have begun the task of sketching what a Rortyan approach to traditional questions in meta-ethics might look like.1 Here, however, I shall attempt to summarize and evaluate some of the contributions that Rorty has made to important debates in first-order nor…Read more
  • Guilt and helping
    In Jeremy S. Duncan (ed.), Perspectives on ethics, Nova Science Publishers. 2011.
  •  61
    Intellectual Honesty
    Scientia et Fides 10 (2): 83-98. 2022.
    Until recently, almost nothing had been written about the moral virtue of honesty in the past 50 years of Western analytic philosophy. Slowly, this is beginning to change. But moral honesty is not the only kind of honesty there is. In this paper, I focus specifically on the intellectual cousin to moral honesty, and offer a preliminary account of its behavioral and motivational dimensions. The account will be centered on not intentionally distorting the facts as the person takes them to be, for o…Read more
  •  66
    How Situationism Impacts the Goals of Character Education
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 27 (1): 73-89. 2024.
    The focus of this special issue is on moral psychology and the goals of moral education. My focus will be considerably narrower in addressing the following question: In light of the situationist movement in psychology and philosophy, what should be the goal(s) of character education? The main conclusion will be that the central goal of character education should be modified in a certain way to make it more empirically informed. But not to worry, as this modification should be amenable to most co…Read more
  •  45
    Gopal Sreenivasan’s new book, Emotion and Virtue, is an incredibly rich and impressive achievement. It is required reading for anyone working on issues related to character. In the spirit of book discussions in this journal, I will focus less on raising objections and more on exploring how the discussion could be extended in new directions or connected with related topics. The plan is to focus on four topics: (i) the scope of Sreenivasan’s project, (ii) his response to the situationist challenge…Read more
  •  70
    "Honesty is clearly an important virtue. Parents want to develop it in their children. Close relationships typically depend upon it. Employers value it in their employees. Yet philosophers have said almost nothing about the virtue of honesty in the past fifty years. This book aims to draw attention to this surprisingly neglected virtue. Part One looks at the concept of honesty. It takes up questions such as what does honesty involve, what are the motives of an honest person, how does practical w…Read more
  •  28
    Accountability, Autonomy, and Motivation
    Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 29 (1): 61-63. 2022.
    John peteet, charlotte witvliet, and c. stephen evans are to be commended for drawing our attention to the relatively neglected virtue of accountability, and for making the case that it is an important virtue to cultivate in general and specifically within the context of psychiatry. I find little to object to in their discussion, and so my comments here will be more of an invitation for them to address in greater detail two important issues: the relationship between accountability and autonomy, …Read more
  •  31
    McPherson on Virtue and Meaning
    Res Philosophica 98 (4): 641-647. 2021.
  •  61
    Brady on Suffering and Virtue
    Journal of Value Inquiry 55 (4): 583-591. 2021.
  •  34
    The Bloomsbury Handbook of Ethics (edited book)
    Bloomsbury Academic. 2023.
    Updated and expanded to represent the fundamental questions at the heart of philosophical ethics today, the 2nd edition of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Ethics covers the key topics in metaethics and normative ethical theory. This edition includes 13 fully revised chapters, and 4 newly commissioned contributions from a range of esteemed academics who provide accessible introductions to their own areas of expertise. The first part of the book covers the field of metaethics, including subjects such a…Read more